


Seafaring

by jerseydevious



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Past Injury, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, and i think hugs and naps should be dispensed, anyway i just think personally we should talk more about how percy got set on fire, the graphic violence tag is for remembered things not things that happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26491192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Mornings are rough, sometimes.
Relationships: Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson
Comments: 29
Kudos: 260





	Seafaring

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, if any single one of you yells at me, you actually have to yell at Audrey. This idea is the gift she gave to me. It was a lovely gift. This one is roughly set in................ they're.......... moved out? 19ish? Welcome to adulthood, kind of, welcome to college, welcome to a bad time to have traumatic memories?
> 
> This fic talks about burn injuries, as a thing. This might be one to skip, if that bothers you!

The bed shifted around her and Annabeth blinked the sleep out of her eyes, her hand fumbling for the dagger that sat idly on her nightstand casting its soft bronze glow, and then warm fingers wrapped around her wrist and tugged her hand back beneath the blanket. _Percy,_ she thought, blearily, because even half asleep she knew the shape of his hand, the feel of it against her skin, the tug of the callouses and the silky strip of the scar that snaked across the meat of his thumb. She knew the feel of his hand on hers, the way she knew he smelled like the sweet breeze that rolled off the sea in the morning, all warm, all gentle, all for her.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he rumbled, and his voice was next to her ear, and oh, it wasn’t the _bed_ shifting around her. She’d been asleep on Percy’s chest. He slid out from beneath her with a grunt, and she twisted to look at him, not really comprehending that he was leaving, even as he sat up—the bed was colder without him, and he’d just sat up. It almost burned her skin. Her hand fumbled across the sheets and looped around his wrist, and she swept her thumb over his pulse, surprised to find that his heart was pounding, unable to think around the burning of the cold and the grogginess and the way she missed the feel of him already.

“What’s up,” she said, or attempted to say, because what actually came out of her mouth was a slurred line of consonants without a single vowel to separate them.

Then Percy was upright, a dark relief against the early morning grayness of the room, and it was strange, how the world in these hours seemed to shift and slip. It felt like she was looking at the world through oil-slathered glass, squinting past the iridescent reflections, trying to see through the distortion. The last she saw of Percy were his shoulders disappearing behind the doorway, down the hall, and Annabeth rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow and tried to will herself back to sleep. Percy kept strange hours the same way she did; Percy was up and down at night, between a glass of water or a midnight snack or a three-in-the-morning shower. Sometimes they kept their weird hours together, but more often than not, they traded off sleep, almost like they couldn’t get out of the habit of keeping watch the way they’d done on quests. Nineteen and in her first year of college and she still had some of the same habits she’d had as a twelve-year-old, nineteen and still living in the shadow of a lifetime spent on the run.

Percy had ducked back in, eventually, because when Annabeth raised her head next, the morning light was filling in and their bathroom shower was running, a long, distant hum. Yellow light slithered across the floorboards beneath the door. Annabeth glared critically at the morning light, a pale white gray as opposed to the blue gray of the early morning and ran her hand along Percy’s side of the bed, cold without him, cold meaning he hadn’t gone back to sleep after he’d wandered off. She’d gone to sleep late—two-fifty-three was the last she’d seen of the little, green-lit digital alarm clock that perched on their bedside table, the one she wanted to smash the second it went off on the weekdays. She couldn’t remember, now, if that had been when Percy had woken her up, or if it had been before.

She sat up and stretched until her back popped and her shoulders felt loose and ached in a good way, until her ribs pressed against the muscles of her stomach and pulled them taut so they felt airy when she settled back into her frame. Annabeth crossed over Percy’s side of the bed and slid off, shivering at the cooler air and then rapped on the bathroom door with her knuckles. “Good morning,” she called, voice throaty from sleep. “I’m up too fucking early, do you want to think about breakfast? We could go somewhere.”

_Or you could cook those waffles in the waffle iron Clarisse got us, please, I’ll do literally anything for homemade waffles,_ she thought, but it was too early for her to beg for waffles. She’d have to wait at least fifteen minutes, when the morning hunger really settled in, before begging for waffles. She had some self-respect. A small amount, enough that she would only resort to pulling on her yoga pants until she was properly starving, and then she would lounge on Percy’s shoulders and pepper kisses down his neck, in the way that made him agree to anything she said on principle. He liked cooking, anyway.

There wasn’t an answer, and Annabeth stood at the door, frowning at it. She knocked again, louder, but there was no response, and some part of her—the part of her that had fallen in love with him knowing that he’d die the day he turned sixteen, the part of him that had known and cried every day he’d been technically dead when they were fourteen—blanked out entirely. She remembered the crushing weight in her chest, the grind of her heart against bone, the hundreds of nights she’d stared at her ceiling and thought about his eyes and thought about them blank and dead. Sometimes it was difficult to remember he had survived at all, around the ways she had tried to plan her life out without him, the futures she had tried to imagine for herself where Percy was a memory to her and a grave she visited with his mother. She snatched the blue ballpoint pen sitting idly on the bedside table and uncapped it, shifting her grip as it sprouted into a sword. She’d forgotten how heavy Riptide was, now, forgotten that the sword shifted magically to accommodate for Percy’s size, but didn’t do the same for her. She used to be able to use Riptide easily, and now it was bulky, and heavy, too long for her—a new sword, for a new man. She had to heft it with two hands to bring the bottom of the hilt down on the part of the door over the lock, but the wood splintered and cracked and the lock snapped through the frame.

_Security deposit,_ she remembered, belatedly, but she sucked in a breath of hot steam and dropped Riptide on the bathroom counter with a loud clang. The shower curtain, blue with printed owls on it, hadn’t been pulled closed and the spray soaked the tiles and stained the grout dark, and Percy was sitting fully-clothed in the bathtub, soaked to the bone and the water streaming over him and staring at her blankly.

There was a moment where she felt wild and irrational, because what was she supposed to say, that Percy hadn’t responded for three seconds and she’d gotten scared he was dead, so she DIY-ed their door and set their security deposit on fire? Annabeth opened her mouth to say something, some small and impossible defense of her snap decision, and then she realized that Percy wasn’t looking at her, but through her. A thousand-yard kind of stare. Chances were he hadn’t recognized she was there at all. Her heart squeezed, and then thudded against her sternum, once, twice, heart grinding against bone. Annabeth pulled a few towels from the linen closet, preoccupying herself with making the movements slow and calm, and bent over to spread a towel over the soaked tiles in front of the bathtub, set the other two on the toilet lid, careful of the way Percy’s gaze hadn’t shifted in the slightest.

It was something that happened, this state of non-being, although it didn’t happen often—he got lost, strangled by the tripwires in his head. She hated it more than she could express, hated it in ways she couldn’t name; Percy was a naturally restless person, almost always shifting, the way the surface of the sea is whipped by the sea wind. When he was lost he was so still he was almost dead. It felt like watching all the currents in all the oceans stutter to a stop. Dead, and the word still burned her, and her heart was still racing. She reached into the spray to tug on his shoulder, because there was nothing else she could really do except for try to untangle him, and then jerked backwards when the water scalded her. Just a few degrees shy of boiling, almost.

“Dammit,” she hissed, and then she turned the water off entirely with a creak of the old lever and a flick of her wrist.

Percy jolted, like the loss of the water was equivalent to a physical strike, and he blinked hard and he sucked in air like he’d been barely breathing, before. He might have stopped breathing altogether; the water made him almost invincible, and maybe he didn’t need to breathe if he had it. She couldn’t begin to understand the threads that tied Percy to the water that was his blood. There was no sea god in their bathroom in their second-story apartment in Ithaca, New York, but that had never stopped Percy before—he could bring the sea to him, he could send it flooding home. 

“It was hot,” he said, between the ragged, hoarse kind of breaths, the ones that were loud and seemed to hiss against the throat. “It was—it was hot.”

Annabeth’s heart squeezed, again, and she stepped over the wall of the tub, dry pajamas be damned—they were technically Percy’s, anyway, a pair of his plaid pants that bunched up around her ankles and one of his old t-shirts—and folded her legs beneath her. His hands found hers, desperately, and her heart broke at the tremor she could feel in them, even though the temperature shock, of his blazing hands to her cool ones, was almost numbing. She ran her thumb over his knuckles, and said, “You’re okay, you’re—do you want to go somewhere else? Somewhere—less hot?”

Percy shook his head, and she didn’t know whether the idea of moving was intolerable to him or if he just didn’t want to track water everywhere. There were small things, miniscule household messes, that were malicious to him. He would knock over a glass and it would shatter and he’d be snappish and short with her the rest of the day, and then he’d curl beside her in their bed and murmur apologies into her neck. _Sorry, ‘Beth, I’m—sorry, I’m sorry,_ and she’d press a sideways kiss to his temple, because she didn’t have words for the things she didn’t understand, that he wouldn’t explain. So it could have easily been both. Annabeth loosed one of her hands and tipped his head forward by pressing at the nape of his neck, until he was folded over and buried in her shoulder. He was hot—burning hot, and she wouldn’t be surprised if half of his confusion, half of the slow look in his eye was heat exhaustion. She knotted her fingers in his wet hair and said, “You’re okay. You’re okay, I’m here—just, keep breathing, baby.”

Percy made a strangled noise and let go of her other hand to wrap his arms around her, crush her to his chest—he always did that, at some point. It was a reliable trait of his, that whenever he was concussed, or sick, or otherwise delirious, he held her like he never wanted to hold anything else. He held her like he’d die if he didn’t. It was like being cuddled by a boa constrictor, sure, but some part of her understood, because it was the way she clung to him when she needed him. It was the way she’d held him at the bottom of the ocean all those years ago, thirteen and Luke Castellan had walked away from her and taken a pound of her heart with him, thirteen and it’d tasted like saltwater and the sweet sea breeze that followed Percy everywhere.

She felt his breathing slow by inches, and his grip slackened, but he didn’t let her go. His fingers knotted in her over-large shirt, but he didn’t let her go. She kept her hand tangled in his hair, drawing circles on the nape of his neck, trying desperately not to ask, _what is this, where is this coming from._ It was hard to know that there wasn’t always a traceable pattern, to Percy’s nightmares, or his bad mornings or his bad nights or his bad days and weeks, that sometimes it wasn’t even a singular, explainable thing, just the weight of his life pressing down on him. She felt it, too, on the odd day, week, and Percy would cup her cheek and ask her _what’s wrong_ and she couldn’t figure out how to say _, I watched my best friend die when I was seven, I watched monsters tear her apart, and I’ve been thinking about Luke and it feels like heart is melting through my aorta, and I still love my dad and I don’t know why,_ and she’d have to settle for, _all of it._ He was almost unbearably good to her on her worst days, when she tried to take the rot bubbling up her throat out on him—he’d stop her mid-argument by pressing a kiss to her forehead and saying, _this isn’t what you want, is it,_ and it was hard to argue with him when he stood in front of her and smelled like that, the sweet sea breeze. Hard to argue with someone who had held her so softly and let the ocean swirl around her, let her borrow one thousandth the comfort the ocean brought him. He pulled her out of the barbed wire loops she’d been running herself into all of her life with a practiced ease, like he’d been born doing it. Sometimes Annabeth felt like the part of Poseidon that Percy had taken to heart was the part of the sea god worshipped for granting safety to seafarers, _Poseidon Asphaleios,_ because if there was one thing Percy was good at, it was pulling people out of the water, it was steering lost ships to shore. It was hard to do the same for Percy. It burned her now, like his too-warm touch, like death, to know that there were things Percy hid from her, that Percy actively made it harder for her to do the same.

He shifted so his cheek was pressed against her hair. “Sorry,” he rasped.

“You’re fine,” she said. “I’m sorry today sucks already.”

Weak words, and she could’ve kicked herself for saying them, but he rumbled a laugh, and then pulled away. His eyes were bloodshot. He’d been crying against her shoulder, probably, and then his mouth was tight and his brows were drawn together, and it made him look too severe for the way his laugh was something she felt in the bottom of her chest.

“I’m okay,” he mumbled, and then he loosed a hand, scrubbed his jaw. It rasped against his stubble. He needed to shave—he was constantly forgetting, but sometimes Annabeth thought he knew how much she liked it, and forgot on purpose. She had her yoga pants, he had the drawer he hid his razor in.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

Percy looked away and off to the side, shook his head, and then straightened. He’d seen the door. Heat rushed to Annabeth’s cheeks.

“You broke the door in,” he said. “With—Riptide. You—how long was I—”

“It’s the morning,” Annabeth said. “The morning, morning. It’s light out.”

Percy exhaled a long breath. “That’s—I’ll pay for that. And the door, too, that was me, I guess. I’ll—I’m sorry.”

“I’m not in love with the money, Percy, I’m in love with you,” she said.

Percy jerked. He pulled his knees together and to his chest, and then startled again, pulling at the soaked fabric. “Jesus,” he said. “I’m—you’re wet, too.”

“I wasn’t going to leave you in here,” Annabeth said. She tucked a damp curl behind her ear.

“I’m okay,” he repeated, still without looking at her. “Really. I am.”

_That’s the lie of yours I hate the most,_ she thought, because his hands hadn’t stopped trembling. It was written all over him, the ache, and still he was bald-faced lying to her.

He wanted to prove it, it seemed, so he shifted his legs back beneath him and then lifted her chin, tipped her mouth into his. It was short, nothing more than the warm press of their lips together, but he went absolutely still next to her, and when she pulled away his hand was still cupping the place where her chin had been. _It was hot,_ he’d said. He hadn’t been talking about the shower. He’d been talking about the fire.

She wrapped both of her hands around his raised one, pulling it closer to her. “Hey, hey, bad idea, bad idea,” she said. Her words ran and tripped over each other. “Bad idea, baby, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

Percy’s eyes fixed on his lap, his jaw working. “Bad idea,” he repeated, softly.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. She drummed her fingers over the sharp ridges of his hands, drew her thumb around one of the deep grooves of the burn scars pressed there. Annabeth tried not to think about how this was her quest, that he was reliving, her quest that he’d all but died on—that he’d asked her to leave, and she had kissed him and left like a coward, and now he tasted ash in her mouth.

“Clothes,” he said, tightly, and she understood a request for space when she heard one. Annabeth stood and stepped over the low wall of the bathtub and slipped into their bedroom, rifling for something comfy, something light. She heard Percy get up, and seconds later, the sound of him retching, and she took a moment to swallow against the bitterness of the guilt in her throat. Her quest. He relived her quest in his sleep.

She changed in the bedroom, trying to offer him a little more breathing room. One of Percy’s sweatshirts and a pair of his jogging pants, so she had to take the time to roll up the sleeves until her hands were useable around all the extra material. Annabeth leaned in the doorway, a bundle of clothes in her arms. Percy was on the tile by the bathtub, one arm slung over the wall for support, leaning so far against it his forehead was almost pressed to the ceramic.

“I’m an idiot,” he said.

“That’s not true,” she said, immediately.

He huffed a laugh. “No, no—I, earlier. I was supposed to take something, so it—wouldn’t hurt as much. I didn’t, I just—I don’t know. Sorry.”

Annabeth dropped the clothes on the counter, on top of Riptide’s gleaming blade, and swung open their mirror, rifling in the medicine cabinet behind it. A cruel part of her murmured you love him, and he has to take prescription painkillers because you left him to die, and she ground her teeth and pushed back the thought. She dropped the hateful orange bottle on the counter, and Percy had pulled himself upright, and slouched beside her, looking profoundly embarrassed.

“Sorry,” he repeated.

“If it were me, you wouldn’t accept that apology, would you,” she said. He looked at her then, his eyes shining, and they hurt to look at. Percy left his heart in his eyes. He was only unreadable when he was looking away. Annabeth tugged him down by the wet collar of his hoodie and tilted his face to the side, pressing a careful, light kiss to his cheek.

“You’re okay,” she said, after he’d straightened, after he was pinning her down with his stare again. She didn’t know how anyone had ever thought he was unintelligent—it’d always seemed so blatantly untrue, when she’d fired insults at him for it, just because of the way he looked at people. His eyes were keen, like the rest of him, sharp and almost a little dangerous, if you didn’t know him.

She let him get dressed, perched on the edge of the bed and tapping her foot against the floor. Seven forty-seven, their green-lit digital alarm clock told her, and Annabeth quietly thanked the world that today was a Saturday. Percy didn’t have work, and she didn’t have class, and she’d didn’t have classwork she couldn’t put off until that night.

He emerged dressed, his curls ruffled like he’d toweled them off in a hurry, scrubbing his face. “Too fuckin’ early,” he said.

“I have a few ideas, on how to solve that,” Annabeth said.

Percy glanced at her, brow arched. “Oh, really.”

“It’s called a ‘nap’,” she said, and she shifted back to her own, further spot on the bed, shuffled beneath the covers. “You and me, and one killer all-morning nap. You can’t say no to that.”

His mouth quirked upwards. “We just got up,” he said.

Annabeth patted the bed beside her. “Some of us never went to sleep.”

Percy crawled in beside her, and then curled around her legs, threw an arm across her waist and pressed his face into her side. Her hand found his damp hair naturally, found the silver streak near his crown, and twirled it around her finger. Again, by inches, he relaxed against her—she could feel it, the unstringing of his muscles and his frame, as the painkiller took effect, as he eased into her touch. And maybe it was one of the best things Annabeth had ever felt, the kind of trust Percy placed in her—not all the time, but sometimes, when it was the two of them and the morning and the warmth they shared with each other, he relaxed against her.

“You can talk about it,” she said, softly, when the morning had shifted from white gray to yellow gray. “If it would help. If you want to.”

“Not words,” he said, roughly. “It’s—I didn’t think I was gonna die. I didn’t think about dying at all. You know how sometimes, something can hurt enough that you want to die.”

Annabeth shifted her right leg, the one with the scar that split her open almost knee-to-hip, given to her when the space between her knee and hip had been shorter. Seven and a bad run-in with an _empousa,_ talons slicing through her, how it’d almost felt cold, it had hurt so badly. Luke had been the one holding her, crooning _it’s going to be okay, you’ll be fine, you’ll live_ while Thalia poured the last of Grover’s reserve of nectar down her throat. She’d been too young to know how to ask for it to end, she’d just been screaming, trying to ask Luke if she was dying.

“It wasn’t that,” Percy said, finally. “It was—it was worse. Hurt too bad to think. Hurt too bad to do anything else. It was, it—I called the sea. I don’t know how. I think it was instinct. I think it’s why I’m alive.”

She bent over and pressed a kiss to the cloth covering his shoulder. She sent a quiet _thank you_ to Poseidon, and for once it wasn’t for falling in love with Sally Jackson—for once it was for the ocean that Percy was bound to, that he could call for and it would always, always answer. She had left him behind. The water hadn’t.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” Annabeth said, around the ice in her throat. “I’m—I…”

His hand fumbled for hers, the one laying by her side, and squeezed. The gesture seemed to say I get it, and Annabeth wanted to tell him that this, this one thing, he didn’t. He didn’t live beneath the weight of losing her. She had built entire futures in her mind, stories she could live after she lost him, and in every single one she brought blue flowers to the grave Sally dug for him, and she did it every week. She had stared down the barrel of a life without him every second she’d known him until it was over, and even now, even holding him, it was hard to believe he’d get to stay there.

“I love you,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I’m sorry, because—that was my quest, it was—”

“Don’t,” Percy rumbled, forcefully, and it was strange, how he could sound forceful even when curled into her. “I made that choice. I had to, and you know it. Don’t—it’s not your fault.”

Annabeth let out a breath. “Sorry. Sorry. I derailed.”

He squeezed her hand again. “That was it,” he said. “I don’t—there’s not words. They don’t make words, for what that feels like. I couldn’t tell you if I tried.”

_They don’t make words because no one else lives that and survives,_ she thought, but the thought weakened her, and she moved until she was curled against Percy. His head on her stomach and her shoulders cast around him, her legs curled up and her knees resting against his middle, her hand still toying with the silver in his hair. It didn’t long for his breathing to deepen and even out, but she stayed awake, curled around him. She stayed awake, and thought of the sweet morning sea breeze, the one that only wandered in once a day, the one that brought with it the rosy morning sky.

**Author's Note:**

> There's a lot of chronic pain issues surrounding burn recovery. I don't think Percy's lucky enough to get away from that completely, even with Magic Healing. Don't yell at me for this one. Yell at Audrey. She's the brains of this operation, I'm just the scribe.


End file.
